With Lincoln in the White House

Letters, Memoranda, and Other Writings of John G. Nicolay, 1860-1865

Michael Burlingame

February
paper, 0-8093-2683-3 / 978-0-8093-2683-9, $22.95t
304 pages, 6 x 9, 1 illus
American History / Civil War

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From the time of Abraham Lincoln’s nomination for the presidency until his assassination, John G. Nicolay served as the Civil War president’s chief personal secretary. Nicolay became an intimate of Lincoln and probably knew him as well as anyone outside his own family. Although he did not keep a diary, Nicolay recorded his conversations with the president in a series of memos. He wrote numerous letters to his assistant John Hay and others, describing the mood at the White House and expressing opinions that were almost certainly shaped by Lincoln. In this expertly edited collection, Michael Burlingame compiles Nicolay’s memoranda, journal entries describing Lincoln’s activities, and excerpts from most of the nearly three hundred letters Nicolay wrote to his fiancée, Therena Bates. This first paperback edition of With Lincoln in the White House offers essential information about Abraham Lincoln.

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“Lincoln scholars will feast on this book.”

—John Y. Simon, executive director, Ulysses S. Grant Association

“Burlingame deserves thanks for making these important letters readily available to scholars and the general public.”

—Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society

 “Burlingame, who has blessed us with a series of edited volumes of papers from Lincoln’s White House circle, now brings together Nicolay’s papers, carefully selected and annotated in marvelous and useful detail. . . . With Lincoln in the White House is both editorially neat and brimming with glimpses into the very heart of the Lincoln Administration.”

—The Civil War News

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Michael Burlingame, Sadowski Professor of History Emeritus at Connecticut College, is the author of The Inner World of Abraham Lincoln and the editor of ten volumes of primary sources about Lincoln, including An Oral History of Abraham Lincoln: John G. Nicolay’s Interviews and Essays—winner of the Abraham Lincoln Association Prize. He won the prestigious Lincoln Prize, honorable mention, for his five edited collections of letters, memoranda, editorial essays, lectures, and interviews by Lincoln’s White House private secretaries, John G. Nicolay and John M. Hay, all published by Southern Illinois University Press.